<p>In this paper, we develop a novel method for view-based recognition of human action/activity from videos. By observing just a few frames, we can identify the activity that takes place in a video sequence. The basic idea of our method is that activities can be positively identified from a sparsely sampled sequence of a few body poses acquired from videos. In our approach, an activity is represented by a set of pose and velocity vectors for the major body parts (hands, legs, and torso) and stored in a set of multidimensional hash tables. We develop a theoretical foundation that shows that robust recognition of a sequence of body pose vectors can be achieved by a method of indexing and sequencing and it requires only a few pose vectors (i.e., sampled body poses in video frames). We find that the probability of false alarm drops exponentially with the increased number of sampled body poses. So, matching only a few body poses guarantees high probability for correct recognition. Our approach is parallel, i.e., all possible model activities are examined at one indexing operation since all of the model activities are stored in the same set of hash tables. In addition, our method is robust to partial occlusion since each body part is indexed separately. We use a sequence-based voting approach to recognize the activity invariant to the activity speed. Experiments performed with videos having eight different activities show robust recognition with our method. The method is also robust in conditions of varying view angle in the range of \pm 30 degrees.</p>